TOP VETERANS' ADVOCATE: Obama's Budget Contains One Of The Most Galling Mistakes Of His Presidency

As a concession to Republican members of Congress who want to see
meaningful entitlement reform, President Barack Obama included in
his budget the so-called Chained
CPI, a cumbersome economic fix that will lead to thousands of
dollars lost to Social Security beneficiaries.

This has been the most controversial aspect of Obama's budget,
one that has his allies and big organizations like
the AARP rallying against cuts to existing
beneficiaries.

But one veterans' advocate says what is most galling about
Chained CPI is the effect the cut will have to young veterans of
the Afghanistan and Iraq wars with debilitating injuries.

Business Insider: So, chained CPI will
impact young veterans with debilitating injuries by cutting their
Social Security Disability Insurance benefits over the course of
the rest of their lives. We know that has a negative effect, but
how bad is it really?

Tom Tarantino: Well, I mean, it’s pretty
bad. It gets to the core value of veterans benefits over the
lifetime of the beneficiary, which is pretty significant.

Obviously with the chained CPI, one of their selling points
is, “Well, this is really just a negligible cut."

Well, it’s not. For veterans — especially the most severely
disabled — they get disability compensation from the VA, which is
impacted by chained CPI, they get Social Security Disability
Insurance which is impacted by the chained CPI, as well as a
whole host of severely disabled veterans that have calculated
through the CPI their COLA.

With chained CPI, [it] at least
gives a double hit to wounded veterans, potentially a triple or
quadruple hit.

So for any individual — I know
AARP has this really cool calculator that shows $1,000, $2,000
over the life of the benefits — when you're talking about
multiplying that by four.

These are men and women living
primarily off their benefits because they’re so severely wounded
due to their service to their country. They don’t have a lot of
money to spare.

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BI: The
reason being that the cut to the benefits for young people
compounds over a much longer period of time than the cut to the
benefits of the elderly?

Tarantino: The biggest problem that I have
with it is that once again we’re going to the most vulnerable and
those who have sacrificed the most and make them sacrifice
more.

We all get that times are tough. Nobody gets that more than the
military families that have been fighting this war for the past
11 years. To come back to them and try to pull more from
that well — in addition to I believe being morally reprehensible
— I think it’s just the wrong way to go.

When we talk about implementing this chained CPI — I get
it, we want to reduce the deficit, even though Social Security
and all those aren’t part of the deficit.

What rancors me is that this is largely a political move so that
those in the administration and in Congress can check the box on
deficit reduction without actually doing it, without actually
having the net effect that we would need to get to a zero
deficit.

So really what this amounts to is political motion as
opposed to policy progress, and to do that while affecting the
lives of the men and women who have sacrificed for their country
is very viscerally, very directly just wrong. It’s been really
hard to articulate that.

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BI: The cuts come in the form of a
complicated adjustment to an economic indicator. This bores most
people, and so it's easier to get a cut through. Are they being
sneaky with this?

Tom
TarantinoIAVA.org

Tarantino: That’s it.

Chained CPI is complicated. It
is boring. It's wonky. It’s also really hard to understand; in a
way it’s sort of a shell game they're playing.

No one’s ever going to come out
and say that "we’re going to cut veterans benefits so that we can
save the budget."

They’re going to do things like
chained CPI which is a strange way to cut benefits, and it’s not
necessarily the most economically accurate.

But I get it. It’s basically
going to go back to those who have a hard time fighting for
themselves. They know by making it this confusing calculation
that nobody really understands they can slip in further cuts to
benefits.

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BI: Strangest of all is that it's the
president proposing this rather than a fringe faction. Does he
know that he's doing this, or was this just an unintended
consequence?

Tarantino: I
understand the political motivation but I don't think the
president or the administration has really factored in all the
issues that affect this.

Like I said, this is not about
real deficit reduction, this is about checking that political
box.

They say we’re going to reduce
the deficit, we're going to save so much money, even though it
really won’t.I
understand the political calculation.

The problem is I don’t think
they had a very clear understanding on how this was going to
affect severely wounded veterans before they went down this road.
And now they’re sort of stuck.

Tarantino: I think
they they stumbled into this. At least I would hope they stumbled
into this.

If they didn’t, that
means there is a concerted effort to cut veterans benefits which
is something that for this administration is a total departure
from what they have done in their first four
years.

They’ve been very supportive
and very proactive. They don't always necessarily get it, it
takes some time. It took a little while for them to get educated
on the issues. But I would think they stumbled into it.

The fact that they went
out and then articulated all these exemptions just totally
underscored the fact that this is a shell game.

If this is really about reducing the deficit and using
chained CPI to make it budget neutral, in exempting all the
people who would qualify, this is really not doing much of
anything. You're really just making a public relations
bid.